


I bade my heart more constant be

by MercuryGray



Series: Hospital Sketches - Alcott/Mercy Street Crossovers [2]
Category: Little Women (2019), Little Women Series - Louisa May Alcott, Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: Conversations, Crossover, F/M, Relationship Advice, Relationship Discussions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-18
Updated: 2020-03-18
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:47:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23202706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryGray/pseuds/MercuryGray
Summary: One of Mansion House's patients has some visitors - and while John Brooke is waiting for Mrs. March's orders in the matter of Mr March's convalescence, one of Mansion House's nurses is wondering if he needs anything himself.
Relationships: Emma Green/Henry Hopkins, John Brooke/Margaret March
Series: Hospital Sketches - Alcott/Mercy Street Crossovers [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1668142
Comments: 6
Kudos: 16





	I bade my heart more constant be

We were apart; yet, day by day,

I bade my heart more constant be.

I bade it keep the world away,

And grow a home for only thee;

Nor fear'd but thy love likewise grew,

Like mine, each day, more tried, more true.

-Matthew Arnold, from Isolation: To Marguerite

-

  
  


In a hospital one got used to constant movement. 

The ebb and flow of patients and orderlies, the noise from the street outside, the shouts of the surgeons. A busy day was a blessing, a slow one a vacuum that asked to be filled with trouble. To be still implied some want of work or faintness of purpose - which was why Emma stopped her tracks when she saw a young man actually sitting in the hallway of one of the upstairs wards. Out of uniform - not a patient, then - and in possession of his limbs, so, not an orderly, either. She’d been introduced, she thought, trying to remember at whose bedside she had been. The chaplain from Massachusetts! Name of March. A bullet to the arm, with a lingering case of pneumonia that would not abate after he’d been left to lie on damp ground too long. His wife had come earlier that week - and this man had been with her. The same sandy hair - a relation, surely.

Mrs. March had been fearful but resigned, ready to set to the business of making her husband well, but this young man looked distraught, his back ramrod straight against the wall, his stare distant. In fact, if Emma hadn’t known better, she’d have thought him sick himself, the way his face was set.

“Mr. March, d'you need anything?” Emma asked, pausing in the hallway. “Mr. March?”

He looked up, startled. “What? Sorry - did you want me?”

Emma smiled and tried to look as matronly as possible. “I was wondering if you needed anything, Mr. March.”

“Oh, it's...it's not March,” he clarified. “It's Brooke.”

“Brooke?” Emma repeated, now feeling a little foolish. Had she mixed up her visitors? “I thought you were - I'm terribly sorry, I thought you were Chaplain March's son.”

“No," he said, almost ruefully. "I'm a ...a...I’m a neighbor." He said, finally, it as if he were not truly sure himself what he was, or wasn't.

 _Well, there’s more to that story if ever I heard it._ "If you don’t mind me saying, Mr. Brooke, it’s a mighty kind neighbor who would bring Mrs. March all the way down here from Massachusetts."

He blushed a little. "They're a kind family, and they deserve some kindness in turn. With four daughters, there wasn't anyone else to come."

"Four! Goodness me, no wonder Mrs. March seems a saint. I've only the one sister and we quarreled like demons."

“Oh, they do their fair share of quarreling,” Mr. Brooke said, sitting up and smiling at the thought “But they always seem to be better friends after.”

Emma glanced discreetly at the watch in her pocket and decided she had time to spare. Sometimes the only medicine someone needed was a willing ear. “Do they have names, these four neighbor sisters of yours?” she asked, gently crossing her arms to wait for his reply.

Brooke chuckled, a little of the tension leaving his shoulders. “There’s Amy, the baby, she’s an artistic type, always with pastels or chalks, and Beth, who’s musical and quiet. Then there’s Jo, who’s a writer and a trouble-maker, and...Meg. Margaret,” he corrected quickly, “Who’s…” He struggled for a moment, his face momentarily in one of those dreamy, pleased smiles that young men in love often have when trying to visualize the beloved. Emma tried her hardest to withhold a grin while Brooke made up his mind. “Well, she’s the oldest, and well-spoken, and the pre - well, she… she manages the rest of them, when she can.”

 _You were going to say prettiest, Mr. Brooke, or I’ll eat my handkerchief,_ Emma thought to herself with another repressed smile, wishing Miss Meg March, wherever she might be, all the best things in the world for managing three younger sisters and making such an impression upon this young man.

She glanced around the doorway into the ward, and, satisfied that she would not be overheard, leaned over and lowered her voice, not able to help the conspiratorial smile on her face. “Mr. Brooke, I’m going to be terribly forward and make an observation that perhaps that’s why you volunteered to help Mrs. March? For one of those sisters? Perhaps?” 

He blushed again, found out at last. “Is it so obvious?”

“Not if you’re not looking,” Emma admitted. What fun this was, to have a secret to keep about the inner workings of a heart that wasn’t her own! She didn’t miss much from before the war, but she missed that - her conversations with her friends - with Alice! - about their latest _crise de coeur_. Having only one’s own heart to worry over was much less fun. “And have you told her?” 

He dropped his gaze and shook his head. “She deserves better than I can give her. I’m not _really_ a neighbor - just ...the neighbor’s tutor.” 

Another restrained smile - for self-abasing suitors were something Emma knew _nothing_ about. If Meg March were here she suspected they’d be fast friends. “And that somehow cancels out how you feel, does it?” she asked, feeling wiser than her years required. “I’ve plenty of friends with fine gowns and rich husbands, Mr. Brooke, and while they can say they made brilliant matches I’m not sure a handful can say they’re happy in them.” 

She could remember those early and brilliant weeks of the war when every young man she knew seemed to be coming home from a military academy covered in braid and talking endlessly of southern valor and the perils of campaign, sending some girls to the photographer’s studio so that her beloved might have a _carte de viste_ and others to the parson, that she herself might have a ring. There were plenty of young widows in Alexandria now, embittered about the presence of the Union, unsure what their future held without the prospect of a husband’s income, or a family’s support. 

The world was changing - she could see that from Mansion House. When the war was over, things could not continue as they’d been. Men would want a wage for their work, and the great fortunes of men like her father would be a thing of the past - and with it the idle lifestyles of her friends. If they were unhappy now in their great houses, how much unhappier would they be in rented rooms with patched up dresses, complaining about the lost luxuries of their youth? No - it was better, she thought, to start with nothing, for it gave all later somethings meaning.

“Give yourself a little credit,” she urged. “I’m sure you’ve more to recommend yourself to her than money alone. She’ll know what she wants - and what she’s willing to sacrifice! And if you give her a chance, she’ll tell you what she thinks. I’m sure with three younger sisters she’s used to speaking her mind. She may have already made it up,” she added, her own thoughts running away a little. “And maybe she thinks she’s not good enough for you, either, and that’s what’s keeping her quiet. But you can speak - you should speak. Plenty of good things in this world have been lost for being silent about them.”

It was Brooke’s turn to smile, a great deal of his earlier anxiety gone. “You’ll forgive me for saying, Miss, but you seem to...speak from experience.”

“And you’re not wrong, Mr. Brooke,” Emma said with a grateful smile, thankful, for once, for being seen. Since Mary had gone to Boston there’d been precious little of that, and she had longed, in recent days, for the council only a close friend could bring. But sometimes there was wisdom in strangers, too. “I’m sure the Chaplain and Mrs. March are glad for your being here,” she said, feeling it was worth repeating as she turned to leave. “Good deeds don’t go unpunished.”

“I hope he speaks up soon, nurse,” Brooke offered. “For your sake. Like you said - good things shouldn’t be lost - especially in the middle of a war.”

Emma turned back and smiled, leaving him in the corridor and going back to her rounds. Henry was in the moribund ward, praying at a bedside as the man before him struggled to draw breath. Her heart fluttered a little as she watched the man’s chest stop, and Henry, sensing the change, laid aside his book and arranged the dead man’s hands, profound respect in every movement, the one last gentle thing that he could do. _I hope so, too, Mr. Brooke. I hope so, too._

**Author's Note:**

> Well, in for a penny, in for a pound. In "The Lecture" I mentioned that Mr. March convalesced at Mansion House, and now here he is, convalescing. In the book, John makes his proposal to Meg after the hospital expedition, so now we can all blame Emma Green's thwarted hopes for Meg March's eventual happiness.
> 
> As it seems to be kind of a running theme in the Gerwig movie that all the men who come into the March household want to join the family, I couldn't resist the mistaken identity at the beginning of the fic. (I think if you put Laura Dern and James Norton in a room someone would think them related!)
> 
> Many thanks to @Jamesknoxpolka for guidance on what horrible medical ills I could foist upon Mr. March - Alcott, for all her medical experience, never specifies just what has Mr. March so ill.


End file.
